Cookham Scouting Centenary Hike

COOKHAM SCOUTING CENTENARY HIKE PREFACE: AN EARLY VISIT.. This hike route concentrates on local connections to the pioneer days of Scouting, but Baden Powell had been here before… During the third quarter of the nineteenth century, while still at school, a young Robert Baden Powell made two big voyages on the Thames that would have taken him through Maidenhead and Cookham. One was with two of his brothers in a collapsible canvas cockleshell boat. They paddled it from London, up the Thames, past Maidenhead and Cookham, and as close to the source of the river as they could manage. He wrote: "we carried our cooking kit, tent and bedding with us and camped out at nights, getting our supplies of food from farms or villages as we went along, and catching fish from the stream". When they reached the source of the river they carried the boat overland to the source of the Avon, then followed that though Bath and Bristol before crossing the Severn, and paddling up the rapids of the Wye to a holiday cottage in Wales. On another occasion he canoed down the Thames from Oxford to Weybridge. So every time we take to the water at Longridge we are paddling the same river as Baden Powell. COOKHAM SCOUTING CENTENARY HIKE On this hike or bike ride around Cookham you can see several sites linked to the Centenary of Scouting. The route will show you… - Where Baden Powell’s sister’s boyfriend changed history up a tree - Where Baden Powell could have drowned before Scouting even began - Where three of the writers that inspired Baden Powell stayed - Where Wide Games entered the Scouting programme - Where the man who triggered the war that made Baden Powell a hero stayed - Where Baden Powell’s Greatest Contemporary went swimming fully clothed - What links BP, Butch Cassidy, Sherlock Holmes and Holy Trinity Church Remember: - Take care crossing busy roads - Be careful cycling on the roads - Wear a helmet if riding a bike - If leaving the bike to explore an area, lock it up securely The context: Robert Baden Powell: its useful to have an overview of Baden Powell’s life and the origins of Scouting before starting this trail since many of the key connections that the walk traces will be discovered out of sequence. He was born in London in 1857 and went to Charterhouse School on a scholarship. He went into the army straight from school and served across the world: in India, Afghanistan and South Africa amongst other countries. During his army career he became interested in how scouting skills could help the army. He defined scouting as “the work and attributes of backwoodsmen, explorers and frontiersmen” and published books aimed at an army audience called “Reconnaissance and Scouting” and “Aids to Scouting”. He served in the Boer War (1899- 1902) in South Africa where his valour and leadership in defending the town of Mafeking during a 7 month siege made him a national hero. Winston Churchill’s aunt was one of those besieged and her telegraph message home captured the mood of pluck in adversity that Baden Powell inspired: “Breakfast today horse sausage. Lunch minced mule and curried locusts. All well”. The country was looking for good news from this war, which otherwise was a disaster. The Relief of Mafeking was greeted by bonfires and rejoicing across the country. Baden Powell returned to Britain after the War as Inspector General of Cavalry, but his mind was already turning to other things. He was increasingly convinced that new activities had to be provided for young people, and felt that his experience in organising the youth of Mafeking to help defend the town could be a blueprint for a new activity programme for young people. Three Big Ideas: Robert Baden Powell made a unique contribution to activities for young people worldwide when he unveiled his Scouting formula on Brownsea Island in 1907. But his ideas about outdoor life, public service and the way that young people should be brought up did not appear out of nowhere. They were part of the general political, educational and intellectual debates of his day, and many of the people who guided and inspired him (and who we shall meet on this tour) shared his preoccupations. Three key themes stand out: The Boer War and the Crisis of Empire: At the end of the nineteenth century, The British Empire was at its peak and Britain was the world’s major power. For many, the dynamism of the Imperial frontier contrasted with what Baden Powell called “dear, drowsy, after-lunch old England”. Defeats by Dutch colonist farmers in the Boer War shocked Britain in the way that setbacks in Iraq were to shock the United States a century later. Kipling summed up the thought that the War’s result should be a call to action: “Let s admit it fairly, as a business people should, We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good…. It was our fault, and our very great fault - and now we must turn it to use. We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse. So the more we work and the less we talk the better results we shall get. We have had an Imperial lesson. It may make us an Empire yet!” Recruitment for the War had shown up the shocking state of health of many urban Britons. Many grew convinced that new ideas were needed to improve the physical and moral fitness of the British people, and that the country needed to return to an older code of honour. This theme unites Baden Powell with others we will meet on this tour such as Roger Pocock, Arthur Conan Doyle and Kipling himself. Like Baden Powell, several others we will meet lived lives of adventure on the imperial frontier: Pocock, Jameson, Churchill and Kitchener among them. The Power of Nature and the Outdoors: During the nineteenth century Britain had transformed itself from a predominantly agricultural economy to the most urban and industrialised nation on Earth. The Industrial Revolution had brought great wealth but it had also brought pollution and disease in the towns. Like Baden Powell, many of those encountered on this Centenary Trail believed that a healthier and more natural life could be led outdoors in the countryside. Geoffrey Winthrop Young, Roger Pocock, Kenneth Grahame and Frederick Walker fall into this category. The Idealisation of Childhood: In pre-industrial and early industrial times most children had laboured for their parents from a very early age. In the Nineteenth century children became seen as in need of legal protection and education. Children became seen as very special and closer to nature than adults. Childhood was seen by many as the ideal stage in life. Bringing up the next generation properly was seen as vital for the future of the country. Baden Powell, Kenneth Grahame, JM Barrie and Kipling all shared some of this view . It is no coincidence that this was the first golden age of British childrens’ fiction. All these themes helped shape Baden Powell’s ideas about Scouting. In 1907 he hosted the experimental Scout Camp at Brownsea Island and in 1908 he published Scouting for Boys. The movement was a huge and international success. Within two years there were over 100,000 members and the Boy Scouts were soon joined by Girl Guides, Wolf Cubs and Rover Scouts. When the First World War broke out, Scouts helped on the home front. The trauma of the War was to trigger one of the biggest changes to Baden Powell’s original idea of Scouting, with the focus moving from Imperialism to World Peace. This change was exemplified by the first World Scout Jamboree in 1920. Cookham is an area rich in connections to the ideas and people who founded Scouting. STOP ONE: THE ODNEY POOL AT COOKHAM WEIR (903 855) From the top of Cookham High Street at 897 853 turn left and then turn immediately right into Odney Lane (you will see the unmistakeable Cookham Tarrystone by the side of the road at the junction). Follow the lane until it ends at a gate just before the bridge. If cycling, dismount at this stage and wheel your bike to the first stop. Go through the gate and over the bridge and carry on on this track for 400m until Cookham Weir at 903 855. The large open expanse of water to your right is the old Odney bathing pool. These days fishing is a far more common leisure activity here. Baden Powell’s visit to Cookham: In the year or so before the Brownsea Island camp Baden Powell was looking for activities that could be part of the programme. In the summers of 1906 and 1907 he visited the Young family, who lived on Formosa Island in Cookham. One of the family was Geoffrey Winthrop Young, a pioneer British Mountaineer. When a student at Cambridge, Young and his friend George Trevelyan devised a Man Hunt game to be played each Easter in the Lake District. A “hare” is selected and is distinguished by a red sash. The rest of the players are “hounds” and must pursue the hare across the moorland. When the hare is tagged by a hound the sash changes hands and the roles are reversed. The game can range over many miles and can take all day. It was first played in 1898 and is still played annually by Cambridge students. Geoffrey Winthrop Young described Baden Powell’s Geoffrey Winthrop Young visit to Cookham in his memoirs: “Robert Baden Powell sat on the Formosa lawn…He was full of plans for scouting for boys - to occupy them better- and asked me to take him out on the river so that I might describe to him our Man-hunt on the fells, and another Game which my brother George had invented, in which two of us had to convey dispatches safely by pace or bluff from one end to the other of some open territory, like Maidenhead thicket, while the rest used every means to intercept and capture them” The link between George and Geoffrey Young’s games and the Wide Games that have always been a part of Scouting are obvious.

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